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Wednesday, 13 February 2013

Nikko

Today I will show you photos from my trip to Nikko last year. I went in early November, so the autumn colours were out and it was very beautiful.

We went only for the day, travelling from Tokyo, but we maganed to see a few different things.

The first place we went is the usual place where tourists go, which is Toshogu.

It's a Shinto shrine dedicated to Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate. We learned a lot about him from the tour guide on this day!

The buildings are highly decorated and detailed with bright colours and lots of gilding. It was certainly impressive, but also suprising to see this kind of decoration in Japan where the temples and shrines are usually so peaceful and simple-looking.

The was also a huge torii gate made of metal! Very unusual.

My favourite thing I saw was this cat that was sculpted as if it had just jumped over the fence:

My cat at home looks the same when she jumps awkwardly off the window sill!

We also visited the former imperial summer palace, which is a beautiful wooden structure. Personally I prefer this to the fancy shrine buildings, as pretty as they were.

The only thing was, it was freezing! Must be nice in the hot summer though.

One of the displays in the palace was a pair of life-size dolls of an Emperor and Empress dressed in Heian era clothes.

They were really fun to look at! They had put false eyelashes on the Emperor as well as the Empress so he looked very pretty too. I won't post his photo because it didn't come out so well, sorry!

One last picture of the palace garden:

I hope you enjoyed the photos! Nikko is a very unique place so I hope you'll have a chance to visit some day.